In case you missed it | A matter of perspective

By now you’ve likely heard that Ted Turner would like to generously donate 25 buffalo to the city of Boulder. He thinks they would look good out on U.S. 36 as you come into town, and they would. Unfortunately, it would also cost the city up to $650,000 to build a fence to keep the critters in their new home and an additional $100,000 a year to keep them fed and healthy. The city is considering Turner’s offer.

Just as a matter of perspective, this is the same city that says it can’t afford to drill a $9,000 monitoring well below the primary tailings pond dike dam at its Valmont Butte property to make sure that the people north of the butte aren’t getting things like lead and arsenic in their drinking water. It’s the same city that says it can’t afford to spend a few hundred dollars to use ground-penetrating radar to find suspected grave sites of early pioneers at the Butte before the bulldozers move in. It’s the same city that won’t spend the money to dig a few holes and test for radium to confirm that it has found the true locations of its 1971 radium dump sites at the Butte.

Maybe if Turner would donate his buffalo to the Valmont Butte site, the city would suddenly be willing to spend the few thousand dollars it would take to do the cleanup job right. It’s a perfect solution. By making sure the buffalo are safe and happy in their new Boulder home, the people living around the site, as well as the cultural resources at the site, would finally be protected. Only problem is that we wouldn’t be able to eat our new buffalo after grazing them at the butte, there would be too much lead in their system.

ACCOUNTABILITY, CENTERED

We were shocked, nay, floored, to see that on March 29, the CU president’s office launched an “Accountability Data Center” to provide figures about, oh, in no particular order, tuition, salaries, academic rigor and teaching loads.

Hmmm. Defensive much? Why would any organization volunteer this information? Unless maybe it had faced literally a decade of scrutiny about things like football sex scandals, professors saying unpopular things about Sept. 11, questions about CU Foundation money and millions paid to departing pigskin coaches. Oh, and mix into that cocktail two right-wing presidents who know more about business and politics than they do about the higher ed environment.

We hate to be making this point during one of CU’s crowning intellectual achievements, the Conference on World Affairs, but this so-called “data center” is simply a charade to stanch the blood flow from recent local media coverage about the university using tuition money to boost already-inflated administrator salaries and sweetheart deals with retired muckety-mucks.

PUSH-BUTTON PIE

The future of ordering pizza delivery, and other household conveniences, may become as easy as pie.

A Dubai restaurant outlet has created a refrigerator magnet that orders your favorite pizza with the push of a button. You peek in the fridge, and if you see nothing you like in the way of leftovers, simply lift a lid on the magnet, press the button, and a built-in Bluetooth device sends a message to the delivery boy to bring your preset Italian disk of joy.

The restaurant, Red Tomato Pizza, asks you to set your pie preference online, and once you press the button, it sends you a confirmation text so that you have the option to cancel. This is one of those fridge magnets that you need to keep up high, out of your kids’ reach.

What’s next? A push-button order for milk?

Flowers? Hookers?

If we aren’t there already, there will be no reason to leave the house — or bother picking up the phone.

Might as well fast-forward us to the scenes in the movie Wall-E, where we all just sit in our recliners and have entertainment and sustenance brought to us without ever leaving our prone position.